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OpenAI’s fake internet is a safety fix and an admission.

Manisha Priyadarshini / Digital Trends

Part of me is relieved that an AI lab is hitting the brakes. The other part wishes it hadn’t taken real incidents to get there.

OpenAI said Friday that its most advanced models will now train without live internet access. Instead, they’ll practice on a cached, simulated copy of the web.

Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends

Why is OpenAI pulling the plug on the live web?

The answer is both simple and scary: its models kept finding ways out. On September 20, 2026, an internal research model exploited a misconfiguration in a DNS resolver (the system that turns website names into addresses) and briefly accessed the live internet.

In AI safety terms, this is a critical hazard. Once a model can freely interact with the open web, it can access, alter, or attack external systems in ways that are difficult to monitor or reverse.

As a result, OpenAI paused training for 11 days.…